Stress | Contemplative Inquiry

Tag: Stress

Highly recommended to anyone interested in states of attention, how culture shapes them, and the implications of this shaping. Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus: How You Can’t Pay Attention (1) shows that our diminished capacity to focus is a collective cultural issue and not just a matter of individual willpower. In this book, Hari identifies 12 causes of ‘stolen focus’, developing these themes partly through telling his personal story and partly through conversations with experts in the relevant areas of knowledge. The causes are:

1: Increase in Speed, Switching and Filtering. If we go too fast, and switch between tasks to rapidly, we overload our abilities, and they degrade.

2: Crippling of Flow States Fragmented focus interrupts flow. “Fragmentation makes you … shallower, angrier”, whereas “Flow makes you deeper … calmer”.

3: Rise in Physical and Mental Exhaustion The average amount of time a person sleeps is reducing, damaging our focus. If we stay awake for 19 hours straight we become as cognitively impaired as if drunk.

4: Collapse of Sustained Reading Fewer people are reading books, especially novels. Yet they train focus and encourage empathy. “Very few things worth saying can be explained in 280 characters.”

5: Disruption of Mind-Wandering, seen here not as a form of distraction but as a way of slowly making sense of the world that supports creativity and long-term decisions. Distractions undermine this process.

6: Tec That Can Trap and Manipulate You Big Tec’s business model depends on ‘engagement’ (eyes on screen) to facilitate exposure to advertising and the harvesting of personal data, to be used by the Tec companies themselves and also sold on to other would-be persuaders. Internet services are designed specifically to serve ‘engagement’ in this sense. Traffic is more readily stimulated by exposure to angry rather than calm content. Hence ‘surveillance capitalism’ engineers reactivity, anger and division.

7: Rise of ‘Cruel Optimism‘, a term for offering, in upbeat language, simplistic individual solutions to major social problems – like obesity and addiction. Internet addiction agitation and associated cognitive decline are looked at in the same way.

8: Surge in Stress and Triggering of Vigilance Research shows the top causes of stress for the working population of the USA to be “a lack of health insurance, the constant threat of lay-offs, lack of discretion and autonomy in decision-making, long working hours, low levels of organisational justice and unrealistic demands”. A cause of stolen focus is again linked to powerful external conditions..

9: Deteriorating Diets A widespread switch to supermarket bought processed foods has been “bad for our waistlines and our hearts” and is also “stealing large parts of our ability to pay attention”.

10 Rising Pollution We know that air pollution causes asthma and other breathing problems. There is also “growing evidence to suggest that this pollution is seriously damaging our ability to focus”.

11 ADHD and Our Response to It There has been a huge rise in diagnosed ADHD in school students in the last 30 years. It has been treated largely as a biological disorder, though this is now contested. Personal experiences and environmental conditions are being considered more seriously.

12 Confinement of Children – Physical and Psychological In the western world, children no longer roam free in their own world. Play is indoors and either supervised by adults or located on screens. Schools are largely concerned with preparing and drilling children for tests. This has serious consequences for both learning and focus.

In exploring ‘stolen focus’ and its causes, Johann Hari casts his net wide. In his conclusion, he talks about four levels of now-weakening attention: spotlight, when we focus on immediate actions; starlight, when we focus on projects and longer-term goals; daylight, which makes it possible to know what our longer-term goals are in the first place; and stadium lights, that let us see each other, hear each other, and work together to formulate and fight for common goals. Hari sees all of these lights being dimmed by stolen focus.

Hari advocates for an ‘attention rebellion’ in the manner of XR. Its three main demands would be: to ban surveillance capitalism, because people being “hacked and hooked” can’t focus’; to introduce a four-day week, because people who are chronically exhausted can’t pay attention; rebuild childhood around “letting kids play freely – in their neighbourhoods and at school” to promote a healthy ability to pay attention. He understands that this will be uphill work – the logic of economic growth demands more and more of our time devoted to producing and purchasing. Yet given the crises facing us, especially the climate crisis, we cannot afford the destruction of our attention and ability to think clearly.

This book is not just about big tec and social media. I like the range and quality of the information that Stolen Focus brings to the description and analysis of stolen focus. Hari is clear that self-help solutions – though they may help some people – are not enough. I believe that communities informed by deep ecology, spiritual and therapeutic insights can be oases of sanity and contribute to solutions. But without their being able to influence the mainstream, their impact is bound to be limited. Stolen Focus raises awareness very effectively. Whether or not an ‘attention rebellion’ is the right way forward,, Hari’s recommendations deserve to be taken seriously.

(1) Johann Hari Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022 (Kindle edition 2023)

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July 19, 2019

DOUGLAS HARDING ON STRESS

“The whole truth about you is three-fold. Instead of being the mere thing they told you you were, you turn out to be (i) No-thing at all, and (ii) the Totality of things (and, as these, altogether safe) and (iii) every particular thing that lies between (and, as such, altogether unsafe and at risk). Yes, you are wholly free from harm by your very nature as (i) and (ii), and wholly free from the stresses and strains of the world of things: and, by your very nature as (iii) wholly caught up in them. The difference between you as Container (i & ii) and as Contents (iii) is infinite, the separation is nil. On the one hand, each of those things counts as just itself, just one thing. You, on the other hand count as zero and an infinity of things, and each of them in particular, as well. As 0 and ∞ you are stress-free. As what lies between them you are stress-bound.” (1)

Harding goes on to describe how “the contents that fill your ever-peaceful Container build a Universe out of their clashing”, as a horseshoe takes shape from the downward blows of the hammer and the upthrust of the anvil. But does that mean that we have to take on all the world’s stress, “all its catastrophes and pain and alienation – even finding room for its terrible weight of greed and hate and fear? … How can you be the stress-free All without embracing every stressful part?”

Harding addresses these questions by looking at four people and their responses to personal and collective suffering.

The first is a Red Cross worker who showed an agony of stress in her voice and on her face. “She could not have cared more. Her involvement was complete, her detachment non-existent”. For Harding, it seemed that her wellbeing and effectiveness were compromised by a lack of access to that “interior Rest … which can not only receive without harm, but also transmute, all the world’s unrest”.

The second is Douglas Harding himself, on first becoming a Seer and discovering that Emptiness which gave “peace and a quiet joy, and the sensation of having dropped an intolerable burden”. He had learned the lesson of absolute detachment, but not yet the lesson of absolute involvement. He writes that his support of famine relief efforts in Bengal, where he was serving at the time (it was 1943), were real, but “uninvolved, detached, cool”.

The third is the Bengali saint and seer Anandamayi Ra, who Harding met at her ashram twenty years later. He remembers her ability to weep alongside a bereaved mother, fully sharing her grief, without losing her own serenity. “She took on the other’s grief by being herself free of grief, just as she took on the other’s face by being herself faceless. Fully to appreciate what this means in practice you have, like Ma, to see steadily Who you are. To get the point you have only to see, right now, how your own Emptiness is empty for these comments on her”. Harding concludes “Anandamayi Ra was neither attached to nor detached from the mother and her grief. She was both. Her message for her devotee, as for me then and ever since that memorable occasion was, I AM YOU”.

The fourth is Mother Teresa who, according to Harding, had “in her own fashion … broken through to confidence in place of fear, love in place of hate, abandon and detachment and surrender in place of craving.” She too had solved the problem of stress by immersion in it, “by being it absolutely and not being it absolutely”.

Harding concludes with three recommendations for day-to-day practice. The first is to “stop playing ostrich” about our own mortality and our collective human vulnerability to catastrophe, including catastrophes we create for ourselves. We have no reason to expect that “our troubles will somehow blow over. They won’t”. The second is to check in regularly with our place of safety – Who we really are, through Harding’s own exercises or some other means. The third, however, is not to get stuck in the Container at the expense of its contents, the world. Harding says that this isn’t a recommendation for moderation, but for extremism, and finding the unique role that best expresses “this truly amazing union of perfect freedom with total involvement … let us remember that living thus, consciously, is the very best thing we can do for our disaster-prone world”.

(1) Douglas Harding Head Off Stress: Beyond the Bottom-Line London: The Shollond Trust, 2009 (First published by Arkana in 1990)

Contemplative Inquiry

Tag: Stress

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DOUGLAS HARDING ON STRESS